Upgrade or wait?

[oldgeek]

I am currently using 22.10 and would like to upgrade, but I keep seeing problems with those machines which have Nvidia. I currently have a Nvidia GeForce GT 730 graphics card using the Nvidia 470 driver. Is it safe to upgrade, or should I wait?

[Snowhog]

Create a LiveUSB and test it on your PC.

[oshunluvr]

I'm not sure a LiveUSB test will determine in the nvidia drivers will upgrade properly during an upgrade.

You might try disabling the nvidia drivers so that you're using the nouveau driver, then upgrading, then re-installing the nvidia drivers.

Of course if you used BTRFS as your filesystem, you can just make a snapshot and try the upgrade.

[oldgeek]

I use BTRFS and have a very recent snapshot on my external hard disk. So I'll try the upgrade and see where it leads me. Thanks.

[oshunluvr]

If you haven't done a "roll-back" it's easy as cake. Let's assume worst case scenario your system won't reboot after the dist-upgrade:

1. Boot to live USB
2. Mount your BTRFS file system
3. Delete "@"
4. Re-snapshot your saved snapshot to the same location that held "@" before - obviously name it "@"
5. Reboot

[shag00]

I can understand your desire to upgrade. From experience over the last year and week with regards to 23.04 the issue is booting not working correctly, the downside. A major issue but easily overcome by booting into recovery and then loading a driver until boot works correctly, you have half a dozen options to try, might take 5-30 minutes. Worst case scenario: reinstall 22.10.

[oldgeek]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I did the upgrade, crossed my fingers, and everything went fine. I'm typing this from my new 23.04 setup, in fact. So if anyone has my graphics setup, from my experience you can upgrade without any problems.

[CharlieDaves]

Of course if you used BTRFS as your filesystem, you can just make a snapshot and try the upgrade.

This has been suggested to me in the past. Can you please provide a simple pros vs cons of BTRFS vs EXT4 filesystems
I am about to wipe my PC and start again, I am getting very very annoyed at all this crap lurking in the background.
I have 20 or so loops (lsblk -l)
I have "new" drives appearing in /media folder and I haven't a clue as to where or what is creating them. (no data, just a tree of folders)

My currently layout is
sda = 120Gb main boot
sdb = /Home
sdc = Encrypt 8Tb
sdd = Erased Drive. Listed as External as it's connected to a port on motherboard that makes it external. Don't ask why it's a 2007 model motherboard

So what precautions do I need to take before I erase sda and start again
I've search for "moving move to new pc" nothing found, will try other variations

[CharlieDaves]

This has been suggested to me in the past. Can you please provide a simple pros vs cons of BTRFS vs EXT4 filesystems

Found something. [HTML]https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-ext4-vs-btrfs-filesystems-in-linux/[/HTML]
Not to sure if it's all that helpful.

Can a seasoned user please explain the "snapshot" thing. As in if I have an 8Tb HDD, 4Tb in use, does snapshot take the entire 8Tb or 4Tb or just the Checksum ?
Then in reverse
How to or do I restore... Similar to my problem [HTML]https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/currently-supported-releases/kubuntu-22-04-jammy-jellyfish/hardware-support-be/673480-disk-error-unable-to-recover[/HTML]

[oshunluvr]

Arch almost always has the best wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs

All that info applies to any BTRFS install. There are dozens of posts on this forum and 100's of websites explaining the features of BTRFS.

Snapshots are of subvolumes, not whole drives unless your whole drive is one subvolume. The size of a subvolume depends on it's contents, not the partition size the file system is on. They take no space at all until stuff is added or subtracted from the source subvolume.

Example:

• You convert SDA1 to BTRFS, your installation size is 30GB and the file system on SDA1 is 120GB with 30GB used.
• You snapshot the 30GB subvolume on SDA1. Still only 30GB used.
• You "dist-upgrade" the install on SDA1 and a total of 10GB of files is added or deleted. Now 30GB + 10GB = 40GB used.

Now you reboot and all is well so you want to keep the new Kubuntu version:

• You delete the snapshot = 10GB recovered.
• You are now using the new version of Kubuntu with 30GB used.

But if you reboot and the upgrade went badly:

• You rename the original (now badly upgraded) subvolume.
• You rename the snapshot to the original to the name of the source subvolume.
• You reboot and delete the badly upgrade subvolume = 10GB recovered.
• You're back using Kubuntu as it was before the dist-upgrade like nothing happened with 30GB used.

[claydoh]

Timeshift makes snapshot creation, restoration, and even browsing their contents a set-and-forget thing. Great for basic, general purpose use-cases. Like rollbacks from oopsies and updates It is even user-friendly on the command line, though it is easy enough to install (temporarily ) from a running live USB.

Not really a backup tool, you still want that for important files. Drives do still die or get corrupted.